The VideoLAN Forums

VLC is the king of Open Source video programs. It supports tons of codecs and is loaded with features. What I have found is that there are no smart playlist files out there. Of course there are tons of playlists files such as M3U. But these playlists are only fixed playlists and not smart playlists. The only smart playlist file type I know of is WPL files which can only be used by Windows Media Player. Every media player for music and audio that supports smart playlists doesn't create a file for the smart playlist but saves then into the program themselves.

VLC should consider creating a open standard smart playlist that would work in VLC and can be made in VLC. I can see others developers in the future wanting to use VLC smart playlists into their own media players. This way people can backup their smart playlists, easily transfer them from device to device. The best way to achieve this is to use XML to structure the smart playlist file and add many features to it just like iTunes has.

What are smart playlists?

What are smart playlists?

Smart playlist are playlists that scan through your library and will generate themselves without the user needing to add the songs to the playlists. It works by adding filters to the playlists. Look at this article for examples.

https://lifehacker.com/355743/top-10-it ... -playlists

I think you are looking for the holy grail of playlist formats:
- media player is instructed to check if the files are present at expected path when the playlist is opened, and only add items to the playlist which can be loated.
- support for relative paths
- ability to select by genre
and some more feature like that.

The hardest part is, the media player has to do all those things, not the playlist. The playlist itself is nothing more than a list. So to create some sort of standard like this, one would need to come up with the desired features and how they should work, and than come up with a file format which serves all the required data to make those features work (such as relative paths, listing of genre).

This could be a whole project seperatly of VLC media player. If anyone has the knowledge and time, please yes, got for it, but I don't think we have someone around willing to take this on.

I think you are looking for the holy grail of playlist formats:
- media player is instructed to check if the files are present at expected path when the playlist is opened, and only add items to the playlist which can be loated.
- support for relative paths
- ability to select by genre
and some more feature like that.

The hardest part is, the media player has to do all those things, not the playlist. The playlist itself is nothing more than a list. So to create some sort of standard like this, one would need to come up with the desired features and how they should work, and than come up with a file format which serves all the required data to make those features work (such as relative paths, listing of genre).

This could be a whole project seperatly of VLC media player. If anyone has the knowledge and time, please yes, got for it, but I don't think we have someone around willing to take this on.

I am surprised that there is no smart playlist file type out there except wpl smart playlists by Microsoft. If someone does make a open standard smart playlist file type I do hope VLC does support it.

I figured that VLC could make it since it is the most popular video player out there. I know smart playlists are more for music but they can also work for videos.

The reason is that this is too complex to standardize.